Exodus

Teachers are leaving Catholic schools for
better pay in public classrooms—but with heavy
hearts.

Many educators wouldn’t hesitate to
make a career move that added $14,000 to their annual salaries. But
Jennifer Christiansen says the decision was one of the toughest
she’s ever made.

Two years ago, she left her job at St. Agnes School—a Roman
Catholic school in Chicago—to teach in one of the city’s
public magnet schools. Although she loved her old job—and the
idea of helping St. Agnes serve its predominantly Hispanic, inner-city
neighborhood—Christiansen says her $21,000 salary wasn’t
nearly enough to help her start a family and buy a house. “When I
went in to tell my principal I was leaving, I lost it—I was in
tears,” she recalls. “Leaving St. Agnes was very hard. If
the salary was different, there wouldn’t be any question;
I’d still be there.”

No one knows exactly how many educators move from Catholic to public
schools each year, but Christiansen’s experience is hardly
unusual. The 26-year-old teacher was one of three St. Agnes teachers
who made the switch from private to public education that year. In
fact, one public school in the same neighborhood employs 10 former St.
Agnes teachers, says Patricia Jones, the Catholic school’s
principal. “I’ve been seeing that here for 18 years,”
Jones says. “The average person can afford to work for us for
about four years, until they start getting serious about life and have
all the expenses that you then incur. I’ve pretty much accepted
the fact that we’re a training ground for the public
schools.”

The few studies that have examined teacher turnover in private
education appear to confirm Jones’ view. A 1995 federal report on
attrition rates for private schools—Catholic and non-Catholic
alike—showed that a private school teacher is much more likely to
switch to a public school than the other way around. A more recent
study, by Richard Ingersoll, a University of Georgia sociologist, shows
annual teacher turnover to be 18 percent at Cath-olic schools, versus
12 percent at public schools. His analysis does not reveal where the
teachers went.

Salaries were not an issue a generation
ago, when most parochial school teachers were nuns.

Salaries were not an issue a generation ago,
when most parochial school teachers were nuns. The sisters worked for
almost nothing, making Catholic education practically, if not
literally, free for many children. But now that 90 percent of the
teachers are laypeople, financing the system is much trickier: Schools
that don’t increase salaries find it harder to hire and keep good
teachers, while those that boost tuition to offer better pay risk
losing pupils. The situation is likely to become even more dire for
Catholic and other private schools as the public system aggressively
recruits the estimated 2 million more teachers it will need over the
next decade. In purely financial terms, the incentives are stacked
heavily against the parochials. The average starting salary for a
Catholic elementary school teacher with a bachelor’s degree is
about $17,700, compared with $25,737 for the public school rookie. The
gap widens as teachers get more experience. Nationwide, the average
Catholic elementary teacher’s salary is about 55 percent that of
public school teachers. To make matters worse, there are few
bureaucratic barriers to transferring between the two sectors; many
Catholic school systems encourage, or even require, their educators to
earn state teaching licenses. “It’s like a food chain, and
I’m not sure who’s behind us,” says Nora Murphy, an
assistant superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of New
York.

Few Catholic school teachers ever expect to earn what they could at
public schools. And many say the financial sacrifices they make by
staying in private schools are justified, at least in part, by
intrinsic rewards—greater control over the curriculum,
collegiality among staff members, and more consistent support from
parents.

“I look at this job as a vocation—not as a
career,” says Patty Quinn, a teacher at St. Jude Elementary
School in Rockville, Maryland. “I really think that the work that
I’m doing has eternal consequences, and that’s worth more
than any money they could pay me.”

That’s not to say Quinn is content with her salary. With a
master’s degree in education, a state license in teaching
reading, and 10 years of experience, she makes $30,200 a year. Although
she’d love to earn the $49,000 she could get in the local public
school district, she’d be happy if she simply didn’t have
to scratch for the cash to cover her expenses. She’s had to work
second jobs at Wal-Mart and at day-care centers to make ends meet.
“I love what I do, and I choose to do it,” Quinn says.
“It’s just so frustrating to pay your bills and have $50
left over to buy food and gas.”

Many Catholic school leaders are sympathetic. When Cardinal Francis
George, the archbishop of Chicago, released an exhaustive study of his
system’s schools in 1998, he called the salary issue the
“single most troubling item in the report.” The Chicago
Archdiocese, which serves the country’s largest enrollment of
parochial school students, has since joined a growing list of Catholic
systems examining new financing structures aimed at improving salaries.
One such structure is the cost-based model, in which school officials
ask parents to pay the full per-pupil cost of educating their children
if they can afford it. Traditionally, Sunday offerings and church
fundraising have subsidized parochial school for all students,
regardless of family income. (The average, subsidized tuition for
Catholic elementary school students is $1,500, while the actual cost of
educating each student veers closer to $2,500.) Using the cost-based
model, Annunciation parish schools in Akron, Ohio, have set a goal of
paying their teachers at least three-fourths of what they could make at
area public schools by fall 2004. “We came to the conclusion that
if we were still going to exist in 10 years, we needed to work toward
retaining our teachers and attracting new ones,” says parish
pastor Paul Rosing.

A big part of selling such a plan is painting a clear picture for
families of just how little their children’s teachers make.
“We explain to parents how teachers sometimes don’t even
have enough money to go to a movie,” says Lawrence Callahan,
schools superintendent for the Washington Archdiocese, which serves
five nearby Maryland counties in addition to the nation’s
capital. “They’re just flabbergasted.”

While the Chicago Archdiocese is
considering adopting cost-based financing for its schools,
officials claim the strategy isn’t perfect.

While the Chicago Archdiocese is considering adopting cost-based
financing for its schools, officials claim the strategy isn’t
perfect. “My worry would be if this became a way for the parish
to say, ‘We have no responsibility to the school,’ ”
explains Elaine Schuster, superintendent of Chicago’s parochial
school system.

Schuster’s teachers learned this winter that they would be
getting a 6 percent raise. While that still puts the system’s
teachers years away from achieving parity with the local public
schools, officials were trying to make a point.

“Hopefully,” Schuster says, “this gives a signal
to our teachers that the archdiocese does want to raise
salaries.”

For background, previous stories, and Web links, see our Issues Page
on School Finance.

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